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Updated: June 5, 2025
The still more complete decay of the Roman marine which, moreover, had remained an object of antipathy to the Romans and had never been fully nationalized scarcely requires to be mentioned. Here too, on all sides, everything that could be ruined at all had been reduced to ruin under the oligarchic government. Its Reorganization by Caesar
But after the great Revolution and the Napoleonic times officialdom lost its influence and social importance in Holland in consequence of the demolition of the oligarchic, patrician Republic; and clause five of the Netherlands constitution, which declares that 'Every Netherlander may be appointed to every public office, is a very real and true description of the actual, visible facts of social life.
We have not a doubt but they would regard with abhorrence any schemes of oligarchic illuminism for guarding the pleasures of the few by politic deception of the multitude.
The inhabitants of the mountainous district, free, rude, and hardy, were attached to a democracy; the possessors of the plains were the powerful families who inclined to an oligarchy, although, as in all aristocracies, many of them united, but with more moderate views, in the measures of the democratic party; and they who, living by the coast, were engaged in those commercial pursuits which at once produce an inclination to liberty, yet a fear of its excess, a jealousy of the insolence of the nobles, yet an apprehension of the licentiousness of the mob, arrayed themselves in favour of that mixed form of government half oligarchic and half popular which is usually the most acceptable to the middle classes of an enterprising people.
A few years later Boris made another bid for oligarchic favor. He issued a rigorous fugitive-serf law, and even wrenched liberty from certain free peasants who had entered service for wages before his edicts. This completed the work, and Russia, which never had had the benefits of feudalism, had now fastened upon her feudalism's worst curse, a serf caste, bound to the glebe.
Aristotle has, in that treatise on government which is perhaps the most judicious and instructive of all his writings, left us a warning against a class of laws artfully framed to delude the vulgar, democratic in seeming, but oligarchic in effect. Had he had an opportunity of studying the history of the English constitution, he might easily have enlarged his list of such laws.
The traditional aptitude and the individual self-denial, on which all oligarchic government is based, were lost in the decayed and artificially restored Roman aristocracy of this age; in its judgment universally the spirit of clique was accounted as patriotism, vanity as ambition, and narrow-mindedness as consistency.
But whatever the cause of the Spartan delay and the rigid closeness of that oligarchic government kept, in yet more important matters, its motives and its policy no less a secret to contemporaneous nations than to modern inquirers the delay itself highly incensed the Athenian envoys: they even threatened to treat with Mardonius, and abandon Sparta to her fate, and at length fixed the day of their departure.
For an oligarchic State tends very readily to illusion, being conducted by men who live at leisure, satisfy their passions, are immune from the laws, and prefer to shield themselves from reality.
It was a hostility which sprung from no accident, and no remembrance of old feuds, but from the opposition of two types of society, the oligarchic idea most fully developed in South Carolina, the industrial democracy in Massachusetts. The new Governor of the State was John A. Andrew, a man of clear convictions, a great heart, and a magnanimous temper.
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